God’s gift of water Part 1 – Water and the Earth

Water is only on this planet because it was part of God’s plan and design.

Water – God’s gift to us

As we go through our lives, there is a thing we come in contact with continually on a daily basis. It is something we literally cannot live without.  We use it many times each day. As matter of fact, water is used by us so many times that we use it without even thinking.

We use it to wash ourselves, we use it to hydrate ourselves, we use it to keep our plants in the garden alive, we jump into it to cool down, we climb into a vessel and float across it when we travel from one place to another.

Companies use it to create electricity, foundries use it to cool down molten metal, fire brigades use it to put out fires, hospitals use it for medical requirements such as dialysis machines, food companies use it to produce food products.

This water is used all aspects of our lives and society in general. What a valuable resource it is……and the best thing is it is absolutely free! It is God’s gift to us.

So this resource which we use tens of thousands of times in our life because of how essential it is, is given to us by God in love. It is his gift to each one of us to make us feel comfortable and more importantly keep us alive.  It is a generally accepted principle that we can only survive without water for three days. That is how important and essential it is to each one of us. It is the most important resource on this earth to mankind.

We see that with droughts – towns have to pay to get water trucked in so they could survive. Crops failed because farmers ran out of water. Water is essential to life and you really notice that when that resource becomes very limited. When there is a lot of it we tend to take it for granted.

Life and water on this planet are inseparable. And that is the way God wanted it. Water has some important spiritual lessons which we will get to over this and the next three articles in this series.

Hydrogen

At the creation of this earth water could not have been formed without the existence of the chemical hydrogen. So God made sure this gas was in abundance at the earth’s inception. Hydrogen is the lightest of all elements and because of this a planet of our size simply doesn’t have gravity to hold on to it. But God made sure that just enough hydrogen, that is, about one percent stayed in the atmosphere, for this one percent when combined with carbon, silicon, sulfur and oxygen proved to be the right recipe to produce water.

The fact that just the right amount of hydrogen stayed in the atmosphere to create water, might look like a coincidence to those of the world but to believers we know it is the great creator’s intervention.

Earth – the right temperature and size

But God’s intervention in the formation of water didn’t stop there. The earth had to be the right size and distance from the sun in order for the earth to stay wet. The reasoning behind this is that the temperature of the earth had to be within a certain range in order to keep water.

When we look at the temperatures of this universe we see that the temperatures extend over a vast range from the deep freeze of space to the thermonuclear heat of stars. Within this immense span of over thirty-six million degrees Fahrenheit, fluid water can occur only within the narrow band of 180 degrees Fahrenheit that lies between its freezing (32) and its boiling points (212). Our planet is just far enough from a star of exactly the right size and condition to keep the temperature within that 180 degree spectrum.

The quantity of water and how it moves

The total quantity of water on the earth has stayed the same since God first created this earth. Water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere could potentially escape into space from Earth. However, it doesn’t escape because certain areas of the atmosphere are extremely cold. However even though It has stayed the same quantity it has never been equally distributed over the earth.

About 97.2 percent of the earth’s water is -found in the ocean basins. God created only two things which can move and redistribute the waterover the earth’s surface and these are the sun and the moon.

The effect of the moon is the strongest with it’s tugging continually at the water on the earth’s surface pulling it away from the body of the planet like a loose garment. Whole oceans flow out toward the moon, bringing high tide to any land that happens to lie in that direction; and it will do it again the next day precisely forty-eight minutes later.

Another influence on the movement of water is the sun. Because of the angle at which the sun’s rays strike our atmosphere, and the distance radiation has to travel to reach the surface, there is an unequal distribution of the sun’s heat. The poles air and sea are always colder than that on the equator. This difference in temperature creates the great ocean currents which flow around our planet. The warm water from the equator will flow up the coast of various continents and warm those currents nearer the poles. This is God’s way of redistributing heat to countries that need it.

Evaporation and water vapour

The sun makes water move sideways but it also makes it move upward by way of evaporation. Evaporation from the surface of the sea goes on all the time, and is fast enough to drain the ocean reservoir completely once every three thousand years.

Water vapor fuels all the winds of the world with around twelve thousand cubic miles of liquid every year, producing huge and largely invisible rivers that flow through the air at every level. This is God’s way of bringing water and life to the land.

If you are having trouble understanding what a cubic mile of water would hold, it would hold forty million swimming pools. Even though this sounds a large quantity it is not when you bear in mind that 97 percent of the world’s water is found in the sea and another 2 percent is found in deep freeze at the polar caps.

The remaining one percent of the worlds water is found on land or in the air. So its a great place if your a penguin or a whale but not so great if you live on land!

Water vapour can only be seen in the air when the air expands and cools making the water vapor condense into minute droplets. These are light enough to remain airborne, suspended by the swirl of other particles. Fifty million of them would scarcely fill a cup, yet it: is these droplets which create the great clouds across the skies.

At any one time, roughly 50 percent of the earth is covered in some type of cloud as 340 cubic miles of water a day is evaporated from land and ocean surfaces.

And every day, exactly the same quantity falls back to the earth as either dew, frost, fog, rain, hail, or snow.

Hail

God has provided all these ways of water returning to the land to sustain life on it. Each form has it’s own way of forming, for example, let’s look at Hail. In Psalm 18 God used it as an instrument of destruction.

Out of the brightness before him hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and coals of fire. Psalm 18:12-13

For hail to form there must be heat. So hail hardly ever occurs in winter, rather it is formed in the up drafts that occur in the great convection storms of summer. These updrafts carry the drops of water in the cloud rapidly up to forty thousand feet, where they freeze. Having frozen they then fall sweeping up drops of water on the way down which make them grow even bigger. Reaching the bottom of the cloud they might get caught in another updraft which will lift them up to great heights again. This process of riding the elevator of air in a cloud may occur up to twenty-five times making the hailstone grow in size each time it goes up and down.

The heaviest hailstone ever measured was 2.25 pounds (1.02 kg) which fell in the Gopalanj district of Bangladesh in 1986. Hailstones have been recorded in the United States with diametres between 5 and 6 inches.

Snow

If we consider snow this is what is recorded in Isaiah chapter 55 and verses 10 to 11.

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

The creation of snow is even more miraculous than hailstones.

Snow begins in a winter cloud, with relatively warm, moist air rising in an updraft until the vapor in it freezes into hexagonal crystals of ice. Millions of these flakes race through the air, slowing down as they grow, and picking up extra water molecules that attach themselves to it adding to its six-fold symmetry. A single snowstorm can produce a trillion snow flakes, and every one of those snowflakes will be different in some way.

There are other ways water falls to the earth. And God talks about each one of these in the Bible like he did with snow and hail.

The water cycle

When water, in whatever it’s form, reaches the earth it gradually makes its way back to the ocean. This can be in the form of a frozen river known to us as a glacier or it can be as a normal river or creek or stream or underground  water. Whatever their form they all have one thing in common and that is that they move downhill in accordance with gravity. As they move downhill they busily shape and mold the land they move through, sometimes making mountains and their associated valleys.So all in all God has taken the ocean, the atmosphere, and the rivers to form a single and colossal circulatory system.

King Solomon talks about this in Ecclesiastes chapter 1 and verses 6 to 7.

The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

In addition to God giving the earth a circulatory system he has given it a network directly responsible for temperature and humidity control. A system that keeps all living things on the earth alive and well.

Conclusion

What we have seen in this article is just another instance of the wonders which our God has created for us,…..for us who are indeed precious in his eyes. Without water, life would be impossible.